Down in the Zero (31 page)

"Burke!"

"And he always did it the same way, right? Said the same words, made you do the same thing. Did he have something special he hit you with?"

"His hand. And a…paddle. A black one. With holes in it."

"Yeah, he's perfect. A ritualistic scumbag."

"No. He never…you mean, like Satanism and that stuff?"

"It's
all
ritual abuse, girl. Got nothing to do with Satan. Child molesters love their rituals, their secret ceremonies. You remember how you told me Charm never got punished in front of you? That's because it wasn't punishment that was going to happen once the door closed. Not like you got, anyway. Your father was having sex with her. For years and years. You were just the appetizer."

"Stop it!"

"Where do you think she learned it, child? You weren't getting punished, you were being used. Spanking kids…the way he did…it's erotic for them. Foreplay, that's all. That's why you hate people who do it—you've always known the truth."

"Noooo…"

"Yes. Trauma is scar tissue over memory, but nobody ever really forgets. Charm showed you how to flip things over. Get powerful yourself…at least that's what you thought. You see it in the kiddie joints all the time. The weaker ones get taken off. Raped. You do it to somebody else, you're not the target, see? Sex in prison, it's not really sex. Any more than rape is. You get to beat on somebody else, it doesn't happen to you. Remember how you said it made you feel? Strong?"

"She was just—"

"Playing. Sure. Playing
you
. For your father. With him. He picked her out from the beginning, Fancy—she never had a chance. She's doing the same thing. Getting powerful. Drinking blood."

"I don't believe you."

"Yeah you do. Charm set you up in business. So you'd have a 'thing' of your own, isn't that what you said? Instead, you've been a Judas goat, staked out so the prey comes sniffing around. And Charm's always there. With her cameras.

She made a moaning sound, dropped her shoulders. I reached over, held her hand. It was damp.

"There's more," I told her. "Charm used Sonny too. When he was just a kid. Got him involved in sex way before he was ready, and it really fucked with his head. She may have been with his mother too…Cherry's gay, right? There's a wire on my phone, in the caretaker's apartment. That's her work too. I thought it was you at first, when I saw the tape. But there's money floating around here. Big money. More than Charm could score from some lousy little blackmail scheme."

"But why…?"

"Your mother knew it too, Fancy. Remember when you told her, what she did? She gave her daughter away. Handed her over like a present."

"I saw that once…what you said. On 'Oprah.' How people get abused when they're kids and they remember it all of a sudden, years later."

"I know."

"But there's like nothing they can do, right? I heard it on the show, the Statute of Limitations. It's too late to make them go to jail…"

"Yeah. They need to call it the Statute of Liberty instead. The freak does his work good enough, he makes the kid block it right out…and then he walks away giggling."

"You think Charm…doesn't remember?"

"I don't think she ever forgot. That's what turned her. Into whatever she is, now."

She was quiet a long time, all inside herself. Then she looked over at me, gray eyes in the dark. "My own sister," she said. "My twin. Now I don't have anybody."

I
made her come back to the caretaker's apartment with me. Showed her the tiny microphone that had sat inside the phone until I pulled it loose.

I took her to the bedroom. Undressed her slowly. We made love. A deep, rich vanilla.

"I
want you to stay with Sonny," I told her the next morning. "All day, no matter what, wherever he goes. Whether he likes it or not."

"Okay."

"Don't 'okay' me, Fancy. It's important. Make a promise."

"I swear," she said, her hand over her heart.

I puffed on my smoke, absently, wondering if she knew. "Fancy, what happened to your other sister?"

"My other sister?"

"Charm said you were originally triplets, remember?"

"Charm tells stories," she answered, looking somewhere else.

I
walked over to the big house. Sonny was awake, at the kitchen table.

"I think I'm close now," I told him. "I need you to do something."

"You got it."

"Fancy's upstairs. Over in the garage apartment. I want you to stay with her. No matter what she does. Don't let her out of your sight. Don't take no for an answer. Stay with her until I get back."

"I'll take care of it," he said. In a man's voice.

T
he junkyard was shrouded in what passes for morning mist in Hunts Point—a nasty mix of industrial pollution and half–burnt

garbage no converter could ever recycle. Terry was right near the gate, as if he was expecting me.

"Mole had a fight," he said.

"A fight? Is he okay?"

"Oh sure. It was, like, not a physical thing. With Zvi."

"The Israeli?" I asked, climbing aboard the shuttle.

"Yes. He didn't want you to know anything about…whatever they took. I couldn't follow it all. He said you weren't one of them. But Mole said, you were one of
him
, and he was going to show it to you. They had this big argument. Then this Zvi guy, he offered Mole money. For the information, he said. Mole got
really
mad then. They started arguing, in Jewish, I guess, I couldn't understand. Then this Zvi guy left."

"Don't fuss about it, kid. They won't do anything to the Mole."

"Oh, I know that. I just never saw him, like,
mad
before."

The Mole was in his bunker. If the argument with the Israeli had him worked up, you couldn't see it on his face.

"You cracked the code?" I asked him.

"Yes. It was what I thought—a sort program. It matched all the names—before and after."

"You have a copy?"

"Yes."

"Any trouble. With…?"

"No," he said, handing me a thick sheaf of papers.

"They do plastic surgery there," I told him. "It's the perfect cover for the ID business."

"They do something else, too."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. See this?" he said, holding up a clipboard covered with calculations.

I nodded, waiting—the Mole had already used up his supply of words for the week and I didn't want to throw him off the track.

"This was an experiment, like I told you. A double–blind, with a probability matrix."

"Huh?"

"Don't play stupid, Burke—I don't have time. There was a group of subjects, all right? It was divided in half. Half received some…input. A substance, a treatment, exposure to radiation…I can't tell. The other didn't—maybe they got a placebo, maybe nothing. Again, I can't tell. Now for the group which got the input, there was a certain result predicted. That's the probability matrix…the experimenter was looking for a result, and that result was something you would
expect
to get in a certain percentage of cases anyway, understand?"

"You got a group of a hundred people. You give fifty of them a pill that causes headaches—you give fifty of them nothing. In the first group, ten of them get headaches. But you gotta figure, people get headaches without the pills. So the question is…how many more? Is that it?"

"Yes. The difference must be statistically significant for the input to be the cause."

"But you don't know who…or what?"

"No."

"Did the…experiment work?"

"I don't know. It's not in the data. The running time was ninety days. They run it four times a year, with different split groups. Whatever they expected to happen, it did happen. But I don't know the probability of it happening without the input."

"Wouldn't they know it?"

"They made…educated guesses. It seems they don't have hard data on it."

"So after ninety days, the…input…it's not gonna work."

"That's what it seems. If it works at all."

"It fucking fits," I muttered.

"You think you know…?"

"Mole, you know all about the experiments in the camps. Remember you told me about them?"

"Yes," he said, Nazi–hate blazing behind his thick glasses.

"They were just experiments for the sake of experiments, right? Not science at all."

"Not science at all," he agreed bitterly. "Sadism. Torture. Freakish ugliness."

"But…even if someone wanted to do real experiments, like for cancer or whatever…you couldn't do it on humans, could you?"

"Not legally. I've heard…about places in the Third World where you can…buy subjects."

"Mole, listen for a minute. Is there a drug that could make people suicidal? Make them kill themselves?"

He stroked the side of his face, took off his glasses, polished them on a greasy rag lying on his workbench. "There are drugs that cause depression, drugs that interfere with cognition, affect mood. All kinds of results. But to actually make people kill themselves…no. If they were already disposed, maybe…"

I
drove out of the junkyard dazed, brain spinning crazy, info–pinballing, colors and numbers bouncing off the corners. Trying to pick a drop of mercury off a slick Formica surface through a cloud of smoke.

Until I faced it. The same way I did with the child I killed in that basement. Just looked at it and looked at it until it told the truth.

Only one question left—who else was in? And how deep?

T
he Plymouth was wedged in the driveway like a roadblock. The garage doors were closed. I jumped out of the Lexus, headed inside. They were in the living room: Sonny, Wendy…and Fancy. She was on a padded chair in the living room, knees together, hands in her lap.

"Hey, Burke! We've been playing a game. You want to play too?"

"What's the game?" I asked her.

"Bondage," she said, holding up her hands, wrists together, as if she was wearing invisible handcuffs.

Sonny's face reddened. Wendy stretched her long legs out on the couch, protective and watchful, not saying anything.

"I don't get it," I said.

"Well, it seems like your young friend here got it into his head that I wasn't supposed to leave."

Sonny nodded agreement with the accusation. Hard to believe this was the same kid Charm had slapped into submission such a short time ago. "Good work," I told him as I took Fancy by the hand and pulled her out of the room.

B
ack in the caretaker's apartment, Fancy sat on the bed as I changed my clothes. "Why did you do that?" she asked.

"Do what?"

"Play that trick. To make me stay there…with Sonny?"

"It didn't have anything to do with Sonny. I just wanted to be sure you didn't wander off somewhere."

"Where would I go?"

"To Charm."

"But you told me—"

"Some things, not the whole thing. I've been stupid. This suicide thing, it didn't start when I came out here. I didn't get it because I was
in
it. Me, not them. I came here with too much baggage, and the weight made me blind. There's one more thing I've got to tell you…and then it's up to you."

"Tell me what?"

"The truth, Fancy. The truth about Charm, and your father."

"You already
told
me," she wailed. "I don't want to—"

"It doesn't matter what you want anymore. Things are gonna happen. Happen soon. I don't want you making any more offerings."

"I don't know what—"

"Offerings. Like the way your mother served you up to your father. Like the way Charm uses you for her blackmail videos. I'm not here for the same reason now."

"In Connecticut?"

"On this earth. I am going to fix things. This time. This one time. I looked into the Zero and I saw it. You know what I got, little girl? Another chance."

"Burke, you're scaring me."

I lit a cigarette. Handed it to her. "Blow me a smoke ring, Fancy."

She pursed her lips, puffed gently. The smoke billowed but didn't form itself into rings. She tried again, working harder. "I can't," she said. So much sadness in her voice—a little girl who couldn't do the trick.

"Watch," I told her. I took the pack of cigarettes, pulled the cellophane wrapper down so it was anchored to the pack only by a thin strip. I held the glowing tip of the cigarette against the cellophane, carefully. When I pulled it away, there was a neat round hole in the cellophane—it looked like an entrance wound. I handed it to her. "Draw in some smoke," I said. "Then blow it into the pack, right through the hole."

She did it, puzzlement in her eyes. The cellophane filled up with smoke, thick and cloudy. "Now tap the back of the cellophane, Fancy. Gently."

She held the pack straight up, tapped a long fingernail against the back. A perfect smoke ring bubbled out of the hole, hanging in the air. "Oh!" she giggled, doing it again.

"That's what we need, girl. A trick. To make things work. You gonna play with me?"

She nodded, as gravely as a child promising to be good.

"D
o you recognize my voice?" I said into the phone, low–pitched and calm.

"Yes," he replied. I could hear the gears switch in his head, down–shifting to someplace familiar. Getting
back
there in a snap–second, alert and ready.

"I have something.
May
have something. Will you meet me?"

"Say where and when," is all he said.

F
ancy led him into the room. I was seated on one side of a desk I'd cobbled together from a door laid across the seats of two chairs. He sat down on the other side. Fancy walked out.

Blankenship was clean–shaven, jungle close. Wearing an old set of army fatigues, camo–patterned. Lace–up black boots on his feet, saddle–soaped, not shined. Ready ever since he got my call.

"Thanks for coming," I said, lighting a cigarette, resting it in an ashtray I'd made out of aluminum foil.

"Please don't be fucking around with me," he said quietly, taking a .45 out of a side pocket. It looked like a custom job, all flat black matte finish, with a short–tube silencer that probably cost more than the gun itself.